Digital literature, "...activates a feedback loop between knowledge realized in the body through gesture, ritual, performance, posture, and enactment, and knowledge realized in the neocortex as conscious and explicit articulations." (132)
Hayles also notes that these two knowledges are not one in the same. She uses the example we briefly touched on yesterday: we know how to type on a keyboard (A), but could we draw a diagram and explain to someone how to type (B)?
Thrift
"technological nonconscious"
Within this there are two arguments that Hayles asserts makes electronic literature ripe for knowledge-making:
"...verbal narratives are simultaneously conveyed and disrupted by code..."
Code is necessary for digital literature, otherwise it could not exist in a digital format. However, code can "transform, mutate and perhaps fatally distort" (137) works so they are no longer read as they are are intended.
The argument here is that distributing a mind action distributes the agency. Using a keyboard to convey words as an extension of the performative, because the keys are distanced well for the hands to quickly glide over the keys to convey meaning. However, Hayles notes, keyboards break, the program crashes before we can save, or we accidentally hit the delete key at the wrong moment. Therefore, our agency is limited because we may not be able to easily recall the information that we were trusting our keyboard to capture.
But a display screen telling us to complete the bolded, incomplete information can give us the power to know how to complete a task.
Through code and agency, and therefore digital literature, the composer has the potential to lead us to know things that we did not know before.
Finally, Hayles gives us a call to action: "Thus understood, computation ceases to be a technical practice best left to software engineers and computer scientists, and instead becomes a partner in the coevolving dynamics though which artists and programmers, users and players, continue to explore and experience the intermediating dynamics that let us understand who we have been, who we are, and who we might become." (157)
Commentary Big topic here: "the implications of entwining of computer and human cognition to create literary language" (155).
Hayles's analysis of the way a work (Walter Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man") can be radically re-interpreted through another artist's transfer to the digital realm (John Cayley's "Translation") is provocative. Benjamin's hymn to language is reduced/augmented by Cayley to become a technological demonstration.
I resist the parallel Brian Kim Stefans draws between "words and phrases that stubbornly resist to be assimilated into the interpretive framework a critic proposes" (155) in art generated by a thinking human and similar outliers resulting from an algorithm. At this stage, examining outliers from human and computer "cognition" on equal footing seems premature.
Question(s) In the broadly stated conclusions from the summary, I am on board... "Through... intermediations, computation.... becomes a powerful way to reveal to us the implications of our contemporary situation, creating revelations that work both within and beneath conscious thought" (157). In this way "computation" allows engineers, computer scientists, artists, programmers, users, and players to "continue to explore and experience the intermediating dynamics that let us understand who we have been, who we are, and who we might become" (159).
But I'm still confused by the nitty-gritty of the interior argument: The "potent possibilities for intermediations in the contemporary moment" rest upon the fact that "only because we do not know what we already know, and do not yet feel what we know" (139). OK - I get the mind/body split as explained through Hayles's examples such as riding a bike (cognitive comprehension separate from physical enactment) but still - what does the statement above mean in regard to digital literature?
Summary
Digital literature, "...activates a feedback loop between knowledge realized in the body through gesture, ritual, performance, posture, and enactment, and knowledge realized in the neocortex as conscious and explicit articulations." (132)Thrift
Within this there are two arguments that Hayles asserts makes electronic literature ripe for knowledge-making:
Through code and agency, and therefore digital literature, the composer has the potential to lead us to know things that we did not know before.
Finally, Hayles gives us a call to action: "Thus understood, computation ceases to be a technical practice best left to software engineers and computer scientists, and instead becomes a partner in the coevolving dynamics though which artists and programmers, users and players, continue to explore and experience the intermediating dynamics that let us understand who we have been, who we are, and who we might become." (157)
Commentary
Big topic here: "the implications of entwining of computer and human cognition to create literary language" (155).
Hayles's analysis of the way a work (Walter Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man") can be radically re-interpreted through another artist's transfer to the digital realm (John Cayley's "Translation") is provocative. Benjamin's hymn to language is reduced/augmented by Cayley to become a technological demonstration.
I resist the parallel Brian Kim Stefans draws between "words and phrases that stubbornly resist to be assimilated into the interpretive framework a critic proposes" (155) in art generated by a thinking human and similar outliers resulting from an algorithm. At this stage, examining outliers from human and computer "cognition" on equal footing seems premature.
Question(s)
In the broadly stated conclusions from the summary, I am on board...
"Through... intermediations, computation.... becomes a powerful way to reveal to us the implications of our contemporary situation, creating revelations that work both within and beneath conscious thought" (157).
In this way "computation" allows engineers, computer scientists, artists, programmers, users, and players to "continue to explore and experience the intermediating dynamics that let us understand who we have been, who we are, and who we might become" (159).
But I'm still confused by the nitty-gritty of the interior argument:
The "potent possibilities for intermediations in the contemporary moment" rest upon the fact that "only because we do not know what we already know, and do not yet feel what we know" (139).
OK - I get the mind/body split as explained through Hayles's examples such as riding a bike (cognitive comprehension separate from physical enactment) but still - what does the statement above mean in regard to digital literature?